GSSC Seminar Series

28 April 2026

'African' management knowledge: Contesting marginality in postcolonial Nigeria (1960s - 1980s)

Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen (University of Cologne)

12:00-13:00

Teaching ‘Africans’ about ‘modern’ business administration was an important part of US-American and British development aid in Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1960s onwards. The talk will discuss these attempts to shape the (micro)economy of newly independent African states focusing on the case of Nigeria. My main focus lies on the resistance of Nigerian engineers as well as businessmen and -women against these attempts. They put forward the concept of ‘African management’ that was a clear call for epistemic freedom and ‘Afrocentricity’ in organizing work in West Africa. African management attacked neo-colonial power-structures in the global postcolonial economic order. But it also put forward other ways of organizing work and the economy as a whole. These ideas will be analyzed. They show that African management did not mean to overcome the principles of industrialization, economic growth or profit seeking. However, African management sought not to copy Western capitalism. Instead, it wanted to make industrialization and development work the African way. 

This research is part of the Emmy-Noether-Group 'Managing Development' which is led by Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen at the Department of History.

Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen is a historian of global history and the history of knowledge in the 19th and 20th century. She has particular regional expertise for East Central Europe. Since 2025 she is leading the Emmy-Noether-Group 'Managing Development'. It investigates the role of management knowledge and managers in development projects in state-socialist Eastern Europe and the 'Global South'. The case studies are situated in China, the GDR, Poland, Ghana and Nigeria. 

Katharina is the author of How to make microbes travel: Circulating bacteriological knowledge and Polish medicine, 1885-1939 (Mohr Siebeck 2018) and she has co-edited the special issue Worlds of Management. Transregional Perspectives on Management Knowledge, 1950-1980 (Comparativ 33, 2023, 5-6). Her work has appeared, among others, in Contemporary European History, NTM and Science in Context.